ING U.S. Files for IPO

ING U.S. Inc. is filing for an initial public offering. The financial giant has hired Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as the initial underwriters. No terms have been set other than that the initial filing, which may change before the formal offering, is for up to $100 million in common stock. ING did not project a stock ticker and it did not confirm whether it would list on the Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange.

This is not looking quite as much like a normal IPO compared to others as the filing says:

The offering may consist of both a primary and a secondary component. In the primary component, ING U.S., Inc. may offer (left blank) of the shares to be sold in this offering. In the secondary component, ING Insurance International B.V. (the “Selling Stockholder”), a wholly owned subsidiary of ING Groep N.V. (“ING Group”), may offer (left blank) shares in this offering. ING U.S., Inc. will not receive any of the proceeds from the sale of the shares sold by the Selling Stockholder.

The company calls itself America’s Retirement Company with approximately 13 million individual and institutional customers in the United States. It also claims some 7,150 employees. Specialty areas are as follows: Retirement; Annuities; Investment Management; Individual Life; and Employee Benefits. As of the end of 2011, the firm had $107.2 billion in assets under management and $208.2 billion of assets under administration. ING U.S. also showed in its filing that it has a distribution footprint of nearly 2,500 affiliated representatives and “thousands of non-affiliated agents and third party administrators.”